Microsoft appears to be fully embracing iOS with a slew of new apps including SkyDrive, Xbox Live, OneNote for iPad, and even an iOS app version of Kinectimals, the popular Xbox 360 Kinect children's' game. It's about time.

Brewing up a photo mosaic is not a lot different than making yourself a cup of coffee with Tinyrocket's Percolator 2.0 iOS app. Released Tuesday, the latest version of the special effects photo app features iPad compatibility, new effects and filters, finer control over images, and a speed boost.

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus. For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from August, September, and October.

Chances are, you've probably read a few 2012 technology predictions by now, or at least heard about some expected tech trends. The Web and blogosphere have certainly seen no shortage of such forward-looking posts; even CIO.com publisher IDG-Enterprise's President and CEO Michael Friedenberg offered up his two cents on what's to come in 2012.

Everybody knows that complex technology needs documents and training materials so that developers can effectively use it. In the cloud, this need is magnified by the fact that developers have to work with several languages at once (HTML, JavaScript, XML, CSS, jquery, Ruby, PHP, SQL...the possibilities are endless). So developers need more docs, right?

Getting a read on how well Microsoft Windows Phone has been doing has been tricky in recent months, with each indication of momentum seemingly offset with one or more negative market share or news reports. But Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's memo sent within the company Monday and published publicly by Microsoft indicates Windows Phone 7 probably isn't living up to Microsoft's expectations.

Apple gave the app, Drivers License, the boot this week after concerned politicians claimed it encouraged identity theft. Drivers License joins a short list of apps that Apple gave boot in 2011 because Apple either didn't get the joke, offered too much functionality, or that Apple felt was downright dangerous.

In 2011, the increasingly mobile and socially networked world of technology became more intertwined than ever with politics and the law. Patent wars shaped competition in tablets and smartphones, hacktivists attacked a widening array of political and corporate targets, repressive regimes unplugged citizens from the Internet, and the U.S. government moved to block the giant merger of AT&T and T-Mobile USA. With the passing of Steve Jobs, the world lost a technology icon who redefined the computer, entertainment and consumer electronics industries. These are the IDG News Service's picks for the top 10 technology stories of the year:

One of Lion's hallmark features was its introduction of a slew of multitouch gestures. By now, you may well have learned most of them. But Keir Thomas discovered one you probably don't know about, a hidden gesture that lets you quickly return to your most recently used space. If you use the four-finger swipe to move from your main desktop to another, or to a full-screen app or the Dashboard, you can quickly go right back to where you were before by executing a four-finger double-tap.

Adoption of cloud-based applications and software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the enterprise could undermine efforts over recent years to boost security, compliance and basic infrastructure and application management - IT maturity - according to new research.